"Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Alice Walker's The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony--only, this isn't fiction. Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, alcoholism, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization...

Words like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers is a collection of poetry by award-winning Ojibwe author Lois Beardslee. Much of the book centers around Native people of the Great Lakes but has a universal relevance to modern indigenous people worldwide. Beardslee tackles contemporary topics like climate change and socioeconomic equality with a grace and readability that empowers readers and celebrates the strengths of today's indigenous peoples....

"I feel like I can't tell one story about a giant mustard penis because it's not about a mustard penis only, but about all of these incidents together, in context, and through time." So begins the title story in Renee Simms's debut short story collection, Meet Behind Mars—a revealing look at how geography, memory, ancestry, and desire influence our personal relationships. In many of her stories, Simms exposes her own interest in issues concerning...

In the aftermath of a messy divorce, Frances Kai-Hwa Wang writes in the hope of beginning to build a new life with four children, bossy aunties, unreliable suitors, and an uncertain political landscape. The lyric essays in You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair Is in Braids deftly navigate the space between cultures and reflect on lessons learned from both Asian American elders and young multiracial children, punctuated by moments rich with cultural and...

Esperanza Cintrón's Shades: Detroit Love Stories is a short story collection that is distinctly Detroit. By touching on a number of romantic and sexual encounters that span the historical and temporal spaces of the city, each of these interconnected stories examines the obstacles an individual faces and the choices he or she makes in order to cope and, hopefully, survive in the changing urban landscape. Shades begins in the 1960s by following two...

Hadha Baladuna ("this is our country") is the first work of creative nonfiction in the field of Arab American literature that focuses entirely on the Arab diaspora in Metro Detroit, an area with the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US. Narratives move from a young Lebanese man in the early 1920s peddling his wares along country roads to an aspiring Iraqi-Lebanese poet who turns to the music of Tupac Shakur for inspiration. The anthology...

"Gut Botany charts my body / language living on indigenous land as a white settler and traveler," Petra Kuppers writes in the notes of her new poetry collection. Using a perfect cocktail of surrealist and situationist techniques, Kuppers submits to the work and to the land, moving through ancient fish, wounded bodies, and the space around her. The book invites the reader to navigate their own body through the peaks and pitfalls of pain, survival,...

With musical language and vivid imagery, Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West attunes us to the sheer wonder of being alive. Intimate reflections on family histories, hardship, and everyday life reveal the ways art and nature can lift us from grief and serve as lodestars in an increasingly uncertain world. Russell Brakefield's poems span American landscapes and personal experience, dropping down in music venues and dark barrooms, back alleys and...

Mortality, With Friends is a collection of lyrical essays from Fleda Brown, a writer and caretaker, of her father and sometimes her husband, who lives with the nagging uneasiness that her cancer could return. Memoir in feel, the book muses on the nature of art, of sculpture, of the loss of bees and trees, the end of marriages, and among other things, the loss of hearing and of life itself. Containing twenty-two essays, Mortality, With Friends follows...

This powerful collection of poems draws on American and African-American experimental lyric traditions, pushing language and form to their limits. Geoffrey Jacques's poetry inspires deep thought, taking up themes of music, psychology, and literature. This work embodies the potential of poetry to forge new connections between aesthetic expression and the often onerous facts of human existence. Poems such as "Still Life" and "Detour Ahead" produce a...